In the summer of 1895, at the International Geographical Congress in London, Doctor Salomon August Andrée, a noted engineer, and chief examiner of the Royal Swedish Patent Office in Stockholm, let it be known that he was planning for a flight to the pole in a balloon, and that active preparations were under way. At first the public regarded the whole thing with an interested incredulity, though geographers, meteorologists, geodesists, and some students of aëronautics had been discussing the possibilities of such a voyage for much longer than a generation, and many had expressed the belief in its feasibility. Sivel and Silbermann, of the University of Paris, had declared as early as 1870 that this was the practical way of attaining the pole. Even so, they had not by long anticipated Doctor Andrée. His first inquiries into the possibility of such a flight had been made in the course of a voyage to the United States in 1876 to visit the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia. On shipboard he had made numerous observations of the winds and air currents, which led him to the belief that there was a general suction or drift of air toward the pole from the direction of the northern coast of Europe and from the pole southward along the Siberian or Alaskan coasts. With this belief in mind, Andrée had gone back to Sweden and begun a series of experiments in ballooning. He built various gas bags and made a considerable number of voyages in them, on several occasions with nearly fatal results. Mishaps, however, did not daunt him, and he became, in the course of the following twenty years, perhaps the best versed aëronaut on earth. He was not, of course, an ordinary balloonist, but a scientific experimenter, busy with an attempt to work out a serious, and to him a practical, problem. In the early nineties Andrée succeeded in making a flight of four hundred kilometers in a comparatively small balloon, and it was on the observations taken in the course of this voyage that he based mathematical calculations which formed his guide in the polar undertaking. If, as I have said, the first public announcement of the Andrée project was received by the rank and file of men as an entertaining, but impossible, speculation, there was a rapid change of mind in the course of the following months. News came that Andrée had opened a subscription for funds, and that the hundred thousand dollars he believed necessary had been quickly provided by the enthusiastic members of the Swedish Academy of Science, by King Oscar from his private purse, and by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of nitroglycerin and provider of the prizes which bear his name. Evidently this fellow meant business.